Just as we were settling down to watch TV on Sunday night, our HTPC
(which runs Vista Media Center) decided to stop working. After
installing some updates, Media Center gave a “component registration
failure” error whenever we tried to watch either live or recorded TV.
After several attempts at fixing it, I decided to re-install Windows
Vista (this was something I’d been planning to do for a while because
Vista had swallowed up almost all of the system drive on which it was
installed). Here are some notes on installing Vista on my HTPC. Our
hardware includes:

I wouldn’t bother saving anything from the previous install; except
perhaps making a note of which TV programs you want to automatically
record (I had saved everything from
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\ (about 600 MBytes) but I didn’t
need any of this data. All of our TV recordings are on a separate
partition and I just told MCE to add that folder to its “Recorded TV
folder watch list”. We manually re-entered all the programs we want
to record.)

Do a clean re-install from the Vista DVD. Tell automatic updates to
not install anything.

Install SP1 (download from MS, not using windows update). If it
doesn’t work then try copying the file to Desktop (not a directory
within Desktop) (I know, I know… sounds crazy but seems to work).
If you’re using a saved version of SP1 then try downloading it again
from MS to your Desktop. If it still doesn’t work then try to ideas
listed by Magon Liu on
technet.

Install Vista Media Centre TV
Pack.
This procedure worked for me (I actually installed this on top of
SP2 and the 2010 WMC update but that’s not best practice. Probably
better to install the TV pack after installing SP1):

Let automatic updates download all available updates. Then install
these updates by shutting down. Repeat until all updates have
been installed.

Install the
hack
to enable remote desktop on Vista Home Premium. (Note to self: I
need the Non-Americal English version)

For the ATI Radeon, ethernet and audio, I just let Automatic Update
install the relevant drives from the “recommended updates”. (In the
past I spent a while tinkering with various ATI
drivers
to get the best signal on our YPbPr component output. It turns out I
needn’t have bothered: the driver installed by Automatic Update
appears to work fine for YPbPr).

Setup the “sleep settings” so that the machine goes to sleep after,
say, 20 minutes (it wont sleep while you’re watching TV but it will
sleep if you leave it idle for 20 minutes… good for saving power).

Setup WMC TV channels. I had to edit several channels to get access
to the full 14-day listings for those channels (edit listings)

I try to mitigate climate change using computer science. I am a Research Engineer at DeepMind, mostly working on energy problems. Previously, I worked on energy disaggregation as a post-doc at Imperial College London. Read more about me…